TOKYO, Feb. 16_(Kyodo) _ Former Livedoor Inc. President Takafumi Horie instructed in a company e-mail message that 30 million yen be sent to the son of a senior ruling party lawmaker as a fee for electoral consultancy work, an opposition lawmaker told a parliamentary panel Thursday.

Horie, former head of Livedoor, a Tokyo company being investigated on suspicion of accounting fraud, has been indicted along with three other executives for alleged violations of securities market regulations.

The instruction was for sending the money to the second son of Tsutomu Takebe, the secretary general of the Liberal Democratic Party, according to Yasuhisa Nagata, a lawmaker of the Democratic Party of Japan.

Horie ran in the House of Representatives election last year as an independent to contest an electoral district held by a rebel LDP candidate. Horie received broad support from LDP lawmakers including Takebe.

We are being asked to believe that Takebe Tsutomu, the LDP's Secretary General, was willing to collude with Horie Takafumi in a circumvention of campaign finance laws.

We are also being asked to believe that Horie is smart enough to launder ghost profits through Macao and Swiss bank accounts--but is stupid enough to write emails to his staff instructing them to send an illegal campaign contribution to the son of the LDP's Secretary General via a ginko koza-to-ginko koza electronic transfer!

"I got this from persons connected to the case via a journalist," claims the sleuth du jour, Democratic Party member Nagata Hisayasu, the 36 year-old former MOF bureaucrat with a B.A. from Todai and an MBA from UCLA.

Oh my dear bright boy....have you never read Sherlock Holmes? "The Adventure of the Norwood Builder" would be a good one to review right about now.